Memorial garden at the edge of the burial ground

With more than half of America’s dead being cremated each year, families often face the question of what to do with those ashes.

Here’s Vassalboro Friends’ answer in Maine.

 

He’s right, of course

As seen at the Castine, Maine, historical museum.

It’s a much different approach to Scripture than reading the stories as law.

Vassalboro

Quakers were a significant portion of the earliest European settlement of the Kennebec valley around Maine’s capital. Many were from Dover Friends Meeting in New Hampshire; many others were from Massachusetts, resisting military service during the Revolutionary War.

At the heart of the network, Vassalboro became home to both a monthly meeting and the state’s second quarterly meeting.

 

 

Oak Grove School, a boarding academy for girls, was founded under the meeting’s care in 1849, and merged with Coburn Classical Institute in 1970. Financial difficulties forced its closure in 1989. I’ll have to check out the campus in its current use on my next visit.

Cobscook Friends

The meetinghouse is in the woods along Maine Route 189 in Whiting – on the way to Lubec and many great outdoors trails.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And it was evening

All of the photographs in the series presented this year were taken within five miles of my home on Moose Island in the city of Eastport. Many of them were shot at the causeway to the Passamaquoddy’s Pleasant Point reservation at Sipayik.

How quickly it all passes.

 

 

 

 

Do you, too, love fireworks?

With our faces toward the setting of the sun